Lynn White Jr Quotes

Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. Lynn White, Jr.

In Lynn White Jr.’s study of the stirrup we find a classic example of a technology introduced for a simple reason (to make riding horses easier) leading to vast and complicated consequences never imagined by its inventors (the rise of medieval feudalism). In the second half of the twentieth century, many scholars in the field of the philosophy of technology began to research similar case studies of unintended consequences. Over time, this idea that tools can sometimes drive human behavior became known as technological determinism.

On Writing Well, by William Zinsser The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, by Ann Patchett There are also several podcasts on writing that I like, including these: Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing Write about Now, with Jonathan Small A Way with Words, with Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett Mad Dogs & Englishmen, with Kevin Williamson and Charles C. W. Cooke (this isn’t a podcast about language, but their command of English is incredible)

However, even if the Benedictine missionaries had worked a bit faster in extinguishing horse-burials, and had thus deprived us of the spade’s testimony of the arrival of the stirrup in Germanic lands, we could have discovered by other means that it must have reached the Franks in the early eighth century. At that moment the verbs insilire and desilire, formerly used for getting on and off horses, began to be replaced by scandere equos and descendere,' showing that leaping was replaced by stepping when one mounted or dismounted. But a more explicit indication of the drastic shift from infantry to the new mode of mounted shock combat is the complete change in Frankish weapons which took place at that time.

The Man on Horseback, as we have known him during the past millennium, was made possible by the stirrup, which joined man and steed into a fighting organism. Antiquity imagined the Centaur; the early Middle Ages made him the master of Europe.

In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.

For the long haul, a draught animal is only as good as its hooves. Oxen seem to have less hoof-breakage than either horses or mules. The feet of horses are particularly sensitive to moisture: it is said that whereas in dry lands like Spain their hooves remain so hard that they can gallop unshod over rocky terrain, in northern Europe the hoof becomes soft, and is quickly worn and easily damaged.